The Selkirk Bannock: A Borders Fruit Loaf

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Robbie Douglas's bakery is documented locally. The Queen Victoria story is repeated by bakers and guidebooks but lacks firm evidence. The name "Selkirk bannock" appears in Scott's fiction forty years before Douglas opened his shop, so a Selkirk bannock of some kind existed before him, though no recipe of that date is known. Much of the detail below comes from the folklorist F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963), which quotes a brochure from the Douglas firm's successors; that is a trade source and its claims about quality are promotional. Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) is used for comparisons with other bannocks and fruit breads. It mentions the Selkirk bannock only briefly and says nothing about Douglas or Queen Victoria.

From bannock to loaf

established In older Scots, a bannock was a flat, round cake of oatmeal, barley or peasemeal, cooked on a girdle. Special bannocks were made for festivals. The Selkirk bannock is something different: a leavened wheat loaf, rich with butter and sultanas, more like a fruit bread than a traditional bannock.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) explains how wide the word "bannock" had become. It suggests the word may come from Gaelic bannach, from Latin panicium, and calls it a generic term for bread in regions that did not grow wheat. An English–Latin wordbook of about 1483 renders it as hearth bread, or bread baked in the ashes. The plain bannock was unleavened until bicarbonate of soda arrived. Yet the Companion stresses that "not every bannock is a simple hearth bread". It names three exceptions: the Selkirk bannock, a festive bread "similar to lardy cakes"; the Pitcaithly bannock, a rich shortbread with peel and almonds; and the Gayle bannock of Wensleydale in Yorkshire, a griddle cake made with lard, flour and currants that fed local quarrymen. In each case "bannock" has come to mean a large round of something richer than everyday bread.

A family of fruit breads

established The Companion's comparison with lardy cake is useful. Lardy cake is an English country tea bread of bread dough enriched with lard, sugar and usually spice and dried fruit, rolled and folded to give layers. It began as a celebration bread for harvest and family festivals, made from dough left over from a big weekly bake. The Selkirk bannock shares the base of bread dough enriched with fat and fruit, and the Douglas recipe also uses lard, but it is mixed rather than layered and carries far more fruit.

established The Companion's entry on fruit cake, signed by Laura Mason, supplies the wider history. Early British "plumb cakes" and bride cakes of the 18th century descended from enriched bread recipes and were raised with yeast. By the mid-18th century yeast was dying out as a cake leaven, and by the late 19th century baking powder had replaced it entirely, except in regional specialities such as the Welsh bara brith. Lightly fruited breads, Mason suggests, were probably more common in the Middle Ages than anything like a modern fruit cake.

established Scotland had its own yeasted festive loaf in the same period. The Companion's entry on black bun records that Meg Dods (1826) gave a "Scotch Christmas Bun" made of bread dough enriched with spices, dried fruit, eggs and brandy, wrapped in a casing of plain dough. Edinburgh bakers made it in the weeks before Christmas. Only later did the bread dough give way to a dense fruit filling in a pastry crust, the modern black bun.

established The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), describes the setting in which Scottish home and shop baking grew. In the Middle Ages scarce wheat was saved for enriched breads for the wealthy, often with eggs, butter, spice and dried fruit; she traces gingerbreads, seed cakes and diet loaves to that strand. A second strand began in the late eighteenth century, when more wheat was grown at home, sugar arriving at the Clyde ports fell in price, tea became affordable and new houses had coal ranges with proper ovens. Period reports she quotes show wheaten bread spreading fast: by the 1790s and 1800s it was "almost the only kind now in use" in East Lothian's towns and large villages, to the disgust of a reporter who thought oats, pease and barley just as wholesome and far cheaper. The Selkirk bannock, a rich wheaten loaf for the tea table, belongs to this world.

shared Set beside these, the Selkirk bannock looks like a Borders survival of the older yeast-raised fruit bread, which elsewhere either became a cake or disappeared. That reading fits the evidence, including Scott's mention of Selkirk bannocks among old-fashioned delicacies in 1819, but no source traces the loaf's descent directly.

Robbie Douglas

established Robbie Douglas opened a bakery in Selkirk's market place in 1859, and his fruit bannock became famous. Traditionally a Selkirk bannock uses only sultanas, in large quantities, rather than mixed fruit.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen, quotes a brochure from Border Bakeries Ltd, Douglas's successors. It says Selkirk bannocks "were known to discerning folk in Scotland a long time ago", but that Douglas spread their fame. By the firm's account he chose butter made from the milk of particular local pastures and would bake nothing if it could not be had, and used sultanas of a particular kind imported from Turkey. The recipe was butter, lard, sultanas, sugar, salt, flour and yeast, with no spice, syrup or colouring. The brochure describes a heavy loaf, flat underneath and domed on top, about half fruit by weight, which wrapped in a cloth in a tin would keep for a month or more. These are a bakery's claims, but they fix what the firm itself regarded as the authentic loaf.

established McNeill's own household version follows the same pattern: baker's bread dough enriched with butter and lard, then sugar, and an equal weight of sultanas, shaped into a large round, proved once more and baked slowly.

established Later home recipes drifted from the bakery's rule. Hope, who credits the bannock to "a local baker" in Selkirk without naming him, prints a version using equal weights of butter and lard, a good deal of sugar, sultanas or raisins and optional candied peel, finished with an egg-white or sugar-syrup glaze. She also warns readers not to confuse it with its "Canadian cousin", the bannock of Selkirk, Manitoba: a plain baking-powder bread of flour, lard and water, cooked in a frying pan over the fire or in the oven, closer to the old flat bannock than to the Borders loaf.

Before Douglas

shared The name is older than the shop. In The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), set around 1700, Scott describes a Lowland village preparing a feast with "car-cakes and sweet scones, Selkirk bannocks, cookies, and petticoat-tails", calling them delicacies little known to his own generation. McNeill quotes the passage. It shows that "Selkirk bannock" was a recognised name by 1819, but it does not tell us whether that bannock was the rich sultana loaf later sold by Douglas or a plainer bread. Douglas is best described as the baker who fixed and popularised the recipe, not its inventor.

established Selkirk had another named bread. John Jamieson's dictionary, quoted by McNeill, records Soutar's Clods, a coarse leavened brown wheaten loaf "used in Selkirk" with a thick crust, which Scott mentions in Redgauntlet. Selkirk's people are still nicknamed the Souters (shoemakers).

Queen Victoria's slice

traditional The best-known story says that Queen Victoria, visiting Sir Walter Scott's granddaughter at Abbotsford in 1867, ignored the spread laid before her and took only a slice of Selkirk bannock. The story is told by bakers and in guidebooks, but it is not clearly documented in accounts of the visit.

Today

established Selkirk bannocks are made by many bakers in the Borders and across Scotland and sold whole or sliced. They are eaten buttered, sometimes toasted, with tea.

• Traditional bannocks were flat oat or barley cakes.
• The Selkirk bannock is a rich yeasted loaf.
• Robbie Douglas opened his Selkirk bakery in 1859.
• Traditional recipes use only sultanas.
• Queen Victoria's slice is a popular but poorly documented story.
• Scott named Selkirk bannocks in a novel of 1819, forty years before Douglas's shop opened.
• According to the Douglas firm, no bannocks were baked in wartime because the right butter could not be found.
• About half the weight of a traditional Selkirk bannock is fruit.
• The Oxford Companion to Food likens the Selkirk bannock to the English lardy cake.
• A "bannock" can also be shortbread: the Pitcaithly bannock is a rich round with peel and almonds.

• Disputed: Queen Victoria choosing only a slice of Selkirk bannock in 1867. The story is told by bakers and in guidebooks, but it is not clearly documented in accounts of the visit.
• Myth: Robbie Douglas invented the Selkirk bannock in 1859. The name appears in Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor in 1819, forty years earlier. Douglas is best described as the baker who fixed and popularised the recipe.
• Myth: The Selkirk bannock is the plain frying-pan bannock of Selkirk, Manitoba. The Manitoba bread is a plain baking-powder bread of flour, lard and water, closer to the old flat bannock than to the Borders loaf.
• Disputed: The Douglas firm's claims about its butter and sultanas. They come from the firm's own brochure, quoted by McNeill, and are a bakery's claims, not independent evidence.